Research and Innovation

The first part of Theo Angelopoulos' career was dominated by references to the myth of the Atreides with the return of the father betrayed by his wife, the plot hatched with her lover leading to his violent death, the suffering of his children, and Orestes' revenge. The story of Ulysses' return to Ithaka later replaced Agamemnon's in his filmography. "The Suspended Step of the Stork" illustrated this theme by depicting the impossibility of the reunion between the modern Ulysses and his Penelope. This article demonstrates that from "Ulysses' Gaze" on, Angelopoulos' narratives became more and more influenced by the Homeric myth. This return to the oldest source of literature allowed the filmmaker to elaborate and express a personal and intimate myth that were developed in "Eternity and a day" and subsequent films.

This essay revisits José Antonio Saco’s intellectual contribution to the Hispanic archive that emerges from the recovery of Bartolomé de las Casas’ texts and the colonial connections between indigenous slavery and the African slave trade. Saco adheres to a notion of Hispanism, filtered through Las Casas, that facilitates a multiple and contradictory identification with coloniality, that allows him to anchor, his national, Caribbean, and universal historiographical project in the Hispanic and Black Atlantic. In turn, Saco and the Lascasian legacy that he rescued becomes an important colonial departure for contemporary theorizations: Antonio Benítez Rojo’s Caribbean readings of a paradoxical and complex repeating island, as well as Fernando Ortiz’ vision of a process of transculturation with repercussions beyond the Caribbean.

This article casts Jean-Jacques Annaud's "Wolf Totem" (2015) as a site of cultural negotiation and focuses on Annaud's adaptational dialogue with Jiang Rong's novel (2004) by the same name to turn a deeply local story into a transnational film. Annaud achieves a more general perspective than the Chinese novel by refusing to make any claims to historical accuracy or documentary objectivity. But, as in most of his previous films, he strives to confront social and political reality from a an independent, informed, and critical position. Annauds thus continues to support and embody a struggle for cinema's independence from any political or material constraint while exposing the shortcomings of any representation of an unknown culture that depends on stereotypes and prejudice.

The Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora (ACDC) project will significantly improve the accuracy of handwritten text recognition (HTR) for Arabic-script manuscripts by developing a collation tool to automatically create large amounts of training data from existing digital texts and manuscript images without time-consuming human annotation of individual manuscripts. The ACDC project will accomplish this task by extending the capabilities of the text alignment tool passim and the HTR engine Kraken to align very poor initial HTR transcriptions of diverse manuscript exemplars with existing digital texts in order to automatically produce training data in a “distantly supervised” manner. The ACDC tool’s acceleration of the training data production process will enable, for the first time, the creation of generalizable Arabic and Persian HTR models required for the digital transcription of large-scale Persian and Arabic manuscript collections.

This chapter compares indexical expressions utilized in English and Japanese email discourse from book companies in the United States and Japan in order to highlight their referential functions and underscore their pedagogical importance. These deictics also serve a marketing purpose by constituting a bond between company and customer and encouraging further patronage. English emails adopt a relatively casual stance, with positive politeness markers such as bare imperatives functioning to invite future customer engagement. Pronominal reference also predominates, whereas in Japanese, recurring combinations of nominal forms with polite prefixes and honorific or humble polite predicates enable a company to express appreciation for a customer’s patronage, acknowledge benefits received, and indirectly index a deferent stance consonant with customer expectations for online vendors.

Language standardization is the core of language policy and language planning (LPLP), which are two different sides of the same coin. Focusing on speakers, language policy decides which language – or variety of a lan- guage – students should learn, teachers should use in schools, officials should adopt in government, employers and employees should converse in when conducting business and people should speak in public. On the other hand, by targeting languages, language planning engages the processes of selecting a standard variety or a standard language (status planning) and normalizing the selected language’s or variety’s grammar, vocabulary, pro- nunciation and scripts (corpus planning) so that it may best fulfil its desig- nated functions. Thus, language standardization may be broadly viewed from the perspective of language policy, of language planning or of both. This chapter takes this broad perspective of the standardization of minor- ity languages – languages that are either not spoken by the majority of citi- zens or not designated as the national or official languages of a nation-state.

Intervening in current debates about the place of big data and computation criticism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary studies, Koser advocates a middle ground between distant and close reading to advance early feminist recovery efforts to rescue forgotten authors from obscurity and to expand the body of literary works deemed "worthy" of scholarly attention. Building on the work of feminist digital scholars in the field of English, Koser uses the prolific German author Benedikte Naubert as a case study to explore the ways in which digital databases, digital collection building, and computational criticism can reveal meaningful dialogues between established and peripheral authors and produce new insights into the German literary imagination around 1800.

Throughout the mid-20th and early 21st centuries, Central American writers, in and outside of the isthmus, have written in response to political and social violence and multiple forms of racial, economic, gendered, and other oppressions, while also seeking to produce alternative social imaginaries for the region and its peoples. Spanning the civil war and post-war periods and often writing from the space of prolonged and temporary diaspora as exiles, sojourners, and migrants, in their respective works, writers such as Claribel Alegría, Gioconda Belli, and Martivón Galindo have not only represented the most critical historical moments in the region but moreover transfigured the personal and collective social woundings of Central America into new signs and representations of the isthmus, often from other sites. Read together, their texts offer a gendered literary topography of war, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization and imagine other “geographies of identities” as suggested by Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg for post-conflict, diasporic societies. These writers’ work is testament to the transformative and transfigurative power of women’s writing in the Central American transisthmus.

This edited volume adopts a new angle on the study of Spanish in the United States, one that transcends the use of Spanish as an ethnic language and explores it as a language spreading across new domains: education, public spaces, and social media. It aims to position Spanish in the United States in the wider frame of global multilingualism and in line with new perspectives of analysis such as superdiversity, translanguaging, indexicality, and multimodality. All the 15 chapters analyze Spanish use as an instance of social change in the sense that monolingual cultural reproduction changes and produces cultural transformation. Furthermore, these chapters represent five macro-regions of the United States: the Southwest, the West, the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Southeast.(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Co-authored with Manel Lacorte and Eliza Gironzetti. In F. Salgado-Robles and E.M. Lamboy (Eds). Spanish across Domains in the United States: Education, Public Spaces, and Social Media

This article describes the creation of the Comité du Film Ethnographique (CFE) in 1953 at the Musée de l'Homme, Paris, France, as an answer to the need to produce documentaries that would meet both the requirement for scientific rigor and the general public's interest in ethnography and diverse cultures. The CFE aimed to legitimize the use of cinema in a relatively new discipline in the scientific world and to highlight the enthusiasm, professionalization, and autonomy of ethno-cinematographers since the beginning of cinema, while having to address the issues and ambiguities linked to this field of research and its place in society.